The B8057 runs out at Rubha nan Sasan, where two concrete gun houses remain from the battery that overlooked the anchorage of Loch Ewe. The guns inside them were 6-inch Mk VII naval pieces taken from HMS Iron Duke, and they covered an examination vessel that checked the credentials of ships entering the anchorage. They never fired in anger. Around the gun houses stand searchlight positions, an observation post, engine rooms and magazines: the coast battery built here in 1941, now Scheduled Monument 5157 and among some of the most complete coastal defences in the United Kingdom.
This is where Cove ends. It sits at the seaward end of western Loch Ewe, reached by a single-track road along the water's western shore, and the drive in is the kind where passing places matter and you use them. There is no pub, conventional shop or church building in Cove itself. What Cove has is the coast, the light off the loch and the concrete.
Between 1941 and 1945 Loch Ewe was the principal assembly base for the Arctic Convoys. As many as 95 ships lay in the loch at once, and at times the military outnumbered local residents three to one. The battery at Rubha nan Sasan was manned first by 308 Independent Coast Battery, then by 154 Independent Battery until the spring of 1944. Aerial photographs from 1946 show the bases of 27 accommodation huts; the huts themselves had already gone. On the headland a memorial to the convoys was unveiled by the Russian Convoy Club in 1999. Churchill called the route it commemorates "the worst journey in the world".
A short hill track from the road-end car park reaches the emplacements and the memorial. The full coastal round to Camas Mòr is a different proposition: 10.5 miles, up to six and a half hours, boggy and often pathless, with a crossing at the Abhainn na Leuma that can be impassable after rain. It passes low cliffs, shallow caves, ruined settlements and an open bothy before reaching a remote beach, but it is not the memorial stroll the car park might suggest. Sheep are usually present, so dogs need to be kept under close control. For something gentler, the Loch Kernsary round from Poolewe is six miles, with views towards Loch Maree and the Torridon hills.
North of the village is a cave the Ordnance Survey recorded in 1875 as a church. It is about forty feet long and fifteen high, and a 1930 account describes a wooden pulpit, benches with bookboards and a partly built-up entrance. Its Gaelic name, Uamh nan Deargann, means Cave of the Fleas.
For food and supplies you drive back down the B8057 towards Poolewe. On the way, at Inverasdale, the old primary school is worth a stop: opened in 1876, it taught local children for 136 years before closing in 2012, and residents formed a trust in 2015 to revive it as the Old Schoolhouse, a community tearoom serving homemade cakes, tea and coffee. Poolewe is where the amenities collect. The village store holds a Post Office and sells Gairloch venison, Sea and Sole fish, Spindrift Croft eggs, honey from five miles away, Ewe Brew real ale and locally tied fishing flies. The Poolewe Hotel, in a building it dates to 1570, keeps Poolewe Lager, Belhaven Best and Belhaven Black on the bar alongside a changing guest ale. Bridge Cottage Art Café has a craft gallery upstairs.
For a day out, Inverewe garden at Poolewe grows Californian redwoods and other exotic planting, with otters and seals off the shore. The Arctic Convoy Museum at Aultbea keeps a doorplate from the Tirpitz, a U-255 signal pennant, and the last surviving Austin 8 NAAFI van, named Bertie, still holding its tea urn and radio. Its memorial garden has three thousand snowdrops, one for each Allied serviceman lost in the Arctic seas.
You will need a car to reach Cove and Rubha nan Sasan; a bus reaches Poolewe, though it is worth checking locally before relying on it further out. The railhead is at Achnasheen, unstaffed, with a waiting room and a four-space car park. But what stays with you is the road running out at the headland, the two grey gun houses watching an empty loch, and the snowdrops counting the men who never came back.